Nobody can recall who first phoned the police on the morning of 4 September 1990, but everyone remembers the girl. Her body, hanging from a pine tree on a steep slope above the Spanish frontier town of Portbou, was visible to anyone looking up from the beach or across from the opposite hillside. She was barefoot, with grey-blue eyes and thick chestnut-brown hair. She wore blue dungarees over a turquoise green shirt.
Portbou, squeezed into a cauldron-like Mediterranean cove, had only 2,000 inhabitants but plenty of police officers. In these years before the Schengen agreement, guards were stationed on the French border but these officers were experts in immigration and smuggling, not violent deaths. Instead, Enrique Gómez, a 35-year-old investigator from the Guardia Civil police force was called in from the nearby city of Figueres to investigate. The phone call came as he was having breakfast in the canteen.
Carles Cereijo, an 18-year-old reporter who had just begun working with the local El Punt Avui newspaper, got to the scene before him. Cereijo had been woken by a call from a waiter friend working the breakfast shift at a cafe. He hurriedly dressed and rushed out with his camera. “I’d never seen a dead body before,” Cereijo recalled. “The police didn’t cordon off crime scenes back then. I managed to get half a metre away and thought, ‘She’s my age!’”
At 8.30am, Gómez arrived with colleagues. The scene was unchanged. A thin white cord was slung over a low branch and around the girl’s neck. Her feet dangled just half a metre above the rough ground, which was sparsely covered by hardy, wood-stemmed herbs and the spiky leaves of prickly pears. Her black sandals were close by, set neatly side by side.
It looked very much like a suicide, but there were many questions. First, how had she managed to climb the tree, tie a knot and position herself, in the middle of the night, without leaving marks on her feet or body? Then, above all, who was she? Nobody in town recognised her. But nor did any of the foreign backpackers passing through Portbou report a missing friend. She carried no ID, no passport, no money, no wallet, no train ticket. Her pockets were empty. It was as though her identity had been deliberately erased.
Yet there was something striking about the whole scene, starting with the angelic look that some perceived on the face of this wholesome-looking, clean-cut girl. “The setting was so theatrical. It left a deep impression,” said Cereijo. After an hour or so, someone placed a pink cloth over the girl’s head, which hung like a bride’s veil. Were it not such a ghastly scene, the composition may have been deemed beautiful – with the veiled girl looking out towards the bay, framed by pine trees.
Later that morning, the girl was taken down and transported by ambulance to the morgue at Figueres cemetery. Forensic doctor Rogelio Lacaci received the body. He saw no reason to question the verdict of a magistrate who deemed the death a suicide. There was no sign of violence, except for the welt left by the cord around her neck.
Lacaci performed an autopsy, which confirmed she had died by hanging. He did not test her blood for sedatives or other drugs. The girl, who seemed to have been in her late teens or early 20s, appeared to have been in good health prior to her death. Apart from a slight suntan, her skin was pale. “She was obviously from somewhere north of Spain,” recalled Lacaci. He was meticulous about photographing her clothes, which may provide some clues. Yet the tags for brands such as Rocky and Impuls revealed little: they could have been bought anywhere in Europe.
Two months passed, but the girl’s identity remained a mystery. The body was still in the morgue’s refrigerator, which was prone to malfunctioning because of sudden electricity cuts, so Lacaci decided to move her to the cemetery. First, he embalmed the corpse to ensure that it remained intact should someone claim her. She was then placed in a white body bag and lifted into niche number 134, high in one of the serried rows of square-faced compartments five storeys high bearing names of the dead that run across the cemetery. This was a space owned by the town hall and used for those whose families cannot pay for their own niches. On the front they scrawled “NN” for “no name”. Lacaci was sure that the girl was safe. If her family ever came looking, she would be easy to identify.
Over the following years, the Spanish media occasionally returned to the mystery. Later, the case featured on European websites listing missing people and unidentified bodies, which desperate relatives turned to, searching for information on their loved ones. Families came from elsewhere in Spain, as well as Germany and France, all seeking missing daughters. Fingerprints and medical records ruled them out.
In 1999, the Spanish government set up the Fénix programme, a new DNA database of missing people. This should have made identifying the Portbou girl much simpler. But when Lacaci arrived at the graveyard in 2001 to take a DNA sample, he found the niche empty. “They’ve stolen the girl!,” he protested to the local judge, but there was nothing he could do. The gravedigger had followed municipal rules, reburying her in the cemetery’s communal grave after 10 years. Her body was now mixed up with dozens of others.
Few corpses remain unidentified in Figueres. In such cases, Lacaci said, they are usually from the margins of society – sex workers, addicts or indigents far from home. The Portbou girl did not fit, he said. Like most people involved in the case – police, officials, townsfolk or journalists – he would never forget her. In 2017, the police officer turned author Rafael Jiménez even wrote a novel, imagining her story. He called it The Hanging Bride in the Land of Wind.
Carles Porta, a 61-year-old writer and film-maker, is a TV phenomenon in Catalonia. Since 2020, Porta has made a true crime show for Catalonia’s TV3, Crims, which he presents and narrates with the theatrical gravitas of a Spanish Orson Welles. Catalans love it so much that, when I last ate with Porta in a Barcelona restaurant, strangers kept coming up to introduce themselves.
Porta sources his stories from a network of old-school crime reporters and, in 2022, Tura Soler – a veteran journalist in northern Catalonia for El Punt Avui – reminded him of the Portbou girl. Three decades after her death, she remained unidentified. Soler had done her best to keep the case alive, writing regular pieces on the anniversary of the girl’s death. “I’m pretty obstinate,” Soler told me. She also sent me links to her articles. “When I heard that they were throwing out old files from the courthouse, I went running over to make sure they saved the Portbou girl documents,” she said in one.
Porta was attracted by the mystery and hoped a Crims episode on the girl might jog someone’s memory and help identify her. As Porta’s team worked, however, the story changed drastically. “Nobody had expressed any real doubt about the suicide until we interviewed Lacaci, and then it all blew up,” recalled Porta. His team showed the now retired doctor the Guardia Civil’s closeup photographs of the hanging girl that had languished, unseen, in the case file. In fact, it was the first time he had viewed the scene in detail.
Lacaci was shocked. “When I saw the photos, I said: ‘Well now, that’s impossible,’” he told me. “You have to tie the cord around the branch and then around your neck. How do you do that, while balancing on another branch in the dark? Either she learned to fly, or someone helped.” Lacaci became so obsessed that he reconstructed the scene in his home, using pieces of wood and his staircase. He decided it couldn’t be done.
When I visited Portbou on a cold December afternoon last year, with the famously maddening tramuntana wind blowing leaves into heaps on street corners, local-born journalist Ramón Iglesias showed me around. Iglesias recalled how, when he worked in a currency exchange in the late 1980s, he sometimes met distraught backpackers who had been drugged and robbed on trains into Portbou from Italy and southern France. They would appear in his office, desperately seeking ways to receive money from their parents. Could something similar, or worse, have happened to the girl?
Lacaci had a different theory. What if she had been hanged by someone else, but as part of some macabre game, or an initiation ceremony that had gone wrong? The pine tree was within a stone’s throw of the town’s white-walled, hilltop cemetery, which overlooks the sea – a suitable spot, he suggested, for such a ritual. More importantly, there were no signs of a struggle. Given the steep, rough terrain and the narrow set of 20-odd concrete steps that had to be climbed to get there, it would have been impossible to drag the girl there, unless she was unconscious or semi-conscious. “Even then it would take four or five people,” according to another forensic doctor, Narcis Bardalet, who used to alternate shifts with Lacaci and recalls seeing the girl in the morgue. Lacaci now also found it highly suspicious that she displayed none of the signs of having climbed a tree: “Nothing under her fingernails, or on her legs or feet or knees – no marks or scratches.”
When Gómez, the Guardia Civil officer, had arrived at the scene on that September morning in 1990, he found some young Austrian campers curled up in sleeping bags about 30 metres from where the body was found. He woke them, demanded their IDs and showed them the hanging girl. “Is she a friend?” Gómez asked. The group protested they didn’t recognise her. It seemed extremely unlikely that a murderer, or a group of them, would hang someone from a tree and then go to sleep nearby. After being quizzed at the local police station they were let go. Deeply shaken, they squeezed into their red Volkswagen T3 van and headed south.
In his zeal to solve the mystery, Porta asked his team to find the Austrians – but three decades after the event, the only one they could track down, Peter Treinbenreif, did not recall much beyond reaching Portbou very late at night, and the trauma of their early morning encounter. Porta turned to the Austrian broadcaster ATV, which ran a short segment on the mystery girl on 23 April 2022. Porta hoped that this may persuade the other Austrian campers to come forward.
By chance, an Italian woman holidaying with relatives in Austria saw the show. The following day she sent an email to ATV, mentioning a young Italian girl, Evi Rauter, who had disappeared 30 years earlier. “It was luck,” the Austrian show’s director, Benedikt Morak, told me.
The next day, Morak contacted Cristina Rauter, the owner of a film location company in Florence, Italy. Rauter was driving a client into the Alps when her phone rang. Morak spoke to her in German, since most people in Italy’s South Tyrol, where the Rauters are from, are bilingual. “Do you have a sister named Evi?” he asked.
Rauter, shaken and somewhat sceptical, kept driving. In the 32 years since her sister Evi had disappeared, she had received many false tips. If Morak sent pictures, she said she would look at them later.
The last time Cristina Rauter saw her sister Evi was on Monday 3 September 1990. Cristina, who was then a 23-year-old economics student, had breakfast with Evi, aged 19, in her Florence apartment before heading to the university library. Evi had come to stay a few days earlier as part of her holiday between finishing school and starting an office job near their home town of Lana, in the mountainous Italian province of South Tyrol. Evi was not sure what she wanted to study at university, so the job was part of a gap year while she worked it out. Earlier in the summer, she had travelled to Ireland for 10 days with two high school friends.
In Cristina’s memory, there was nothing strange about Evi that morning, and the sisters joked around as they always did. “She was calm, with no signs of sadness or depression, just wanting to enjoy the last few days of summer,” Cristina told me. Evi had recently spotted a cut-price purple swimsuit and spent most of her pocket money on it. A few days earlier, she and Cristina had argued about hitchhiking after Evi claimed it was a great way to travel. That was not something young women did alone, Cristina told her. Apart from that, “everything was normal”, Cristina said when we met outside the same apartment block last summer. Before leaving, Cristina handed her a 50,000 lira note – about €25 – so she had cash for the day. Evi said she might clean the apartment or visit Siena, the medieval Tuscan town 45 miles south.
When Rauter returned at lunchtime, there was a yellow Post-it note on the table with a scribbled message. “I felt like going to Siena, so I’ll be back later,” it read. The coach and rail stations were a 15-minute bus ride away, safely through the city centre. Rauter figured it would take her sister about two hours to reach Siena by bus or train, and the same to return. She expected Evi to walk through the door that afternoon or evening. Hours went by, day turned to night, but she did not appear.
Evi was cool-headed, organised and friendly. “Very respectful,” said her sister. “A good person.” She was not the type to suddenly go wild and change her plans, though her new enthusiasm for hitchhiking did concern Cristina. Both she and her sister were quite reserved, and they were very close. “We were best friends,” Cristina told me. “If she had problems, she talked to me.”
By 8pm, Cristina began to worry. By 10pm she was panicking. She stayed by the phone, hoping Evi would call to explain that she had missed the last train, or had gone elsewhere. It never rang. That night, she barely slept, staring at her sister’s empty bed. The next morning, she reasoned that Evi would be on the first train, or that the phone would ring. Then she called her parents in Lana. Her father, Herman, spent until daybreak at the railway station in nearby Bolzano, hoping his daughter had decided to come home. “Our horror film began,” said Cristina.
She rang hospitals in Siena and Florence. Evi had left her bags and even her sunglasses behind, but she had taken her house keys, Casio watch, student rail discount card and ID card. If there had been an accident, Evi should have been easily identified. Police told Cristina she had to wait 48 hours before reporting her sister as a missing person. Torn between going out to search and sitting by the phone (mobile phones were not yet common), she cycled in panic around Florence, hoping to run into Evi on the street.
At 9am the next morning, she was finally able to report her sister missing. She gave the police a full description – a teenage girl with thick chestnut hair, wearing jean dungarees, a green shirt and a Casio watch. It was exactly the description that, two countries and almost 600 miles away by road or rail, the Guardia Civil was writing into its reports on the mystery Portbou girl.
Evi’s family plastered Florence, Siena and railway stations across Italy with posters. Cristina and her parents, Herman and Karolina – an engineer and a secretary – gave interviews to newspapers and television programmes. In TV interviews, Cristina came across as a poised and sensible young woman from a middle-class family, earnestly explaining why her sister would never just run away.
The family went back to the police continually, asking for information. Newspapers and TV shows speculated wildly, and painfully, about whether Evi had run off with a secret boyfriend, perhaps an immigrant. Cristina was offended at the implication: in her home, there would be no reason for keeping such a relationship secret.
The search and the wait took their toll. Police seemed to suspect that Evi had disappeared willingly. Cristina was plunged into a world of speculation and anguish. Had she missed something? Had Evi been kidnapped by people traffickers? Did she hitchhike on her own? Could Cristina have done something to prevent her disappearance? Then there was the guilt. She wondered whether she should have stayed at home that fateful morning, rather than going to the university. “The first two or three years were very difficult,” she said. Even decades later, she or her parents would catch a glimpse of a girl who looked like Evi in the street.
Over the years, Cristina thought up elaborate fantasies that kept her hopes at what she calls “one per cent”: that Evi fell into the sea, was rescued and ended up far away; or suffered some kind of blackout; or decided to start a new life in a distant land. “Maybe she’s in Brazil or somewhere and will come back one day and suddenly the [door] bell is ringing.” But her mind told her a completely different story: “Something had happened somewhere between Florence and Siena. She’s somewhere in a forest and she’s dead.”
In 2011, 21 years after she went missing, the family applied to have Evi declared officially dead. In November 2012, the court finally posted the brief announcement in Italy’s Gazzetta Ufficiale. It offered a partial form of closure that stopped the regular flow of letters – voting slips, reminders for medical check-ups, and so on – landing in her parents’ postbox.
“You do not forget, of course,” Cristina said. “But you have to learn to live with it, or you go mad.”
As she continued driving into the mountains, Cristina tried to process the information she had been given in the phone call. Was the caller playing a cruel joke? Later that day, high up in the snow-clad Alps, she downloaded the photos, squinting at the small screen on her phone and wondering if they had been Photoshopped. “I recognised the clothes,” she said. “But it could still be fake.”
It took her two days to study the photographs properly on a computer. The pictures Lacaci had taken of Evi’s clothes sealed it. Her mother recognised her underwear with the words “touch me now” printed on the elastic. “I bought that in Lana,” she said. That was a painful moment for Cristina.
Looking closer at the images, Cristina was struck by the expression, in death, on her sister’s face. “It seems like an angel is there. She is quite happy. It’s strange, as if she’s on drugs or something.” (Spanish police did not test for drugs in 1990. “Maybe we should have,” admitted Gómez, who still believes it was a suicide.) And then there was the dramatic setting. “I mean the tree, the panorama, the cemetery, the position, the symmetry,” said Cristina. “That’s not possible to do unless you know the place and are thinking about all those things. For me it’s like a scene from a film. It’s not normal.”
The strange serenity of the scene did nothing to soften the emotional pain. “It’s a mixture of shock and tragedy,” Cristina said. But having some kind of resolution to the mystery that had haunted them “was important, for me and also for my parents”.
The peace of knowing that Evi really had died, and where, was soured by an invasion of journalists, who drove her parents to leave their house in Lana. The case sparked Facebook groups and speculative YouTube videos. Cristina stopped answering her phone.
The discovery of the Portbou girl’s identity also threw up questions, chief of which was: was Evi murdered? “We now know the end, but nothing else,” said Cristina, who believes there was foul play. “Between my front door and the tree, we do not know anything.”
There were many reasons for suspecting murder. How, instead of travelling 45 miles south to Siena, did Evi travel 600 miles north and then west, crossing the borders of France and Spain – two countries she had never visited? What happened to her ID, money and railcard? How, in the middle of the night, had she found the pine tree and climbed the narrow, steep concrete steps leading up towards it? Why would a girl who had just bought herself a new swimsuit, who was about to start a new life, choose to take her own life, in such a public and dramatic fashion, so far from home?
Evi had been found after daybreak, about 22 hours after saying goodbye to her sister. It takes 10 straight hours to drive from Florence to Portbou, which leaves little space for hitchhiking – though her sister considers it a reasonable explanation. If she travelled by rail, Evi could have caught a 13.15 train from Florence and changed at Pisa to a Portbou-bound train due to arrive at 5.45am. Yet that would require her to be firmly set on leaving Italy with the equivalent of about €55 in her pocket.
Portbou is small: it takes just 10 minutes to walk from the railway station to the pine tree by the cemetery. Evi could have been there before sunrise. But then what happened? A woman from an apartment block close by claimed to have heard loud voices and a girl crying out in the night. But it wasn’t unusual to hear shouting and strange noises in the summer, when the beach was full of partying backpackers. “Portbou was a fiesta every night,” said Bardalet, the forensic doctor.
The Austrians camping near the tree bedded down in the dark long before Evi could have reached the spot from the station. They did not see or hear anyone in the night. Whatever may have happened, they slept through it. I managed to speak to two of them. Michael Fuhs is now a musician. “I recall this policeman waking me up and then he took maybe 10 steps and I was standing in front of this girl,” Fuhs told me. “I was very suddenly very awake.” The group were mostly childhood friends and members of a Vienna band, Emerald Beyond, which had a loyal following. They often drove south to Spain or Portugal and already knew Portbou, which was why some of them chose to sleep near the cemetery and away from the bustle of the beach. It felt like a private spot, Fuhs said, and not one that a newcomer would have found easily in the dark.
In June 2022, two months after Evi was identified, Italian police – on the recommendation of a court pathologist – opened a murder investigation. But Spanish courts refused to reopen the case. A murder in Spain, if that is what it was, has a statute of limitations attached that means nobody can be charged with the crime after 20 years. Even so, Cristina had not given up hope of finding at least some of the answers she sought.
Cristina flew to Spain on 11 May 2022, less than three weeks after she had received the phone call that solved, at least in part, the mystery of Evi’s disappearance. Cristina was taken by Porta’s team of journalists to Portbou to see what she soon dubbed “the odious” pine tree, fighting contradictory emotions of horror and curiosity. She met Lacaci, Gómez and others who had been involved in the case. In video footage of the encounters, she looks perplexed and pained.
“When you saw the body hanging there like a sack, what impression did you have? Did it seem natural?” she asked Gómez.
“There was no sign that she had been attacked,” he replied.
Almost two years later, in January 2024, Cristina returned privately to Portbou. Without company or cameras, she wanted to “feel the feelings” that came from being there. Wandering around town, she found it strangely suspended in time, full of closed shops with 1990s signage that had gone out of business after the Schengen agreement came into force and internal EU border controls disappeared. A high-speed rail line that bypassed the town had delivered the final blow in 2010. The cavernous railway station was empty, there were few people in the streets and the smart mansions that once belonged to prosperous customs agents were decaying. “It seems that when Evi went there, the town also died,” she said.
Cristina also decided to ask permission to dig up the common grave area at Figueres cemetery to seek her sister’s remains. Since Evi had been embalmed, the corpse should be intact, making it easy to find – if they knew roughly where she had been placed. Cristina wanted, above all, to bring her sister home for a proper burial, but she secretly hoped more clues may emerge if Evi’s body was disinterred.
It took her many months to grind a path through the Spanish bureaucracy. Dates were repeatedly set, and then postponed. In the meantime, the Italian police investigation failed to come up with anything new and was closed. “They call it a crime without a suspect,” Cristina said.
Finally, permission came through to dig for Evi’s body. In December last year, I stood beside Cristina in the chilly cemetery as a light drizzle fell and a small red mechanical digger scooped up mounds of soil. The Figueres town hall had closed the cemetery for two days. Police guarded the gate. Lacaci was there. So, too, were Gómez, the Guardia Civil officer, Bardalet, the other forensic doctor and the journalists Tura Soler and Carles Porta, whose team flew a drone overhead to film the process. Bardalet, wearing a felt trilby, purple latex gloves and carrying an umbrella, was in charge, accompanied by a white-overalled archaeologist. A small cheroot cigar was clamped between his teeth.
The location for where to search had been identified by the gravedigger, who inherited his role from his father. But Figueres does not have a single communal grave. Instead, holes have been dug in several grass plots. “They’ll have to dig the whole place up,” said Lacaci.
An hour after digging began, there was a flurry of excitement as the first bones were discovered. When we broke for lunch in a restaurant for workers at a nearby industrial estate, Bardalet told me they had found bits from several bodies – none of which were Evi. An embalmed body was very different from the fractured, decomposing skeletons being discovered. It should have remained whole, and still be in its white bag.
They dug again that afternoon and the following day. Under the freezing rain, onlookers stamped their feet or wandered off to find somewhere warm for coffee. Gradually, the digger turned a waist-high trench into a massive hole. Shards of bone from about 200 corpses were picked from the soil and placed in boxes, but the body they sought never appeared. Evi’s mystery had not just gone to the grave with her: the grave itself now seemed to be missing. “It’s always been as if this girl was just beyond our reach,” said Bardalet.
At the end of the first day, I sat with Cristina in a cafe drinking hot chocolate during a power cut. She was angry at how many mistakes had been made. On the day Evi was found, no forensic doctors had gone to the scene. The photographs of the scene had never been shown to Lacaci. Evi’s watch and shoes, which may have provided clues about where she had been, had disappeared, along with the cord around her neck. No DNA had been taken. And now her sister’s body was lost. “Everything seems incredible,” she told me.
Cristina had not told her parents she was back in Figueres. She did not want to worry them further. She had already asked me not to contact them, since the earlier press attention had proved so stressful. She eventually told them at Christmas and said this meant it was now a closed matter for the family. Yet she also still hoped that somebody, somewhere may reveal the secret of what had happened – perhaps someone who had met Evi during her journey, whether by train or hitchhiking. “Maybe, before dying, they will think they have to say something,” she said.
The youngest of the onlookers in the graveyard was the mayor of Portbou, Gael Rodriguez, a 20-year-old representative of the socialist party. He had been elected in 2023, when he was studying law and working in his parents’ bar. After Evi’s story featured on Porta’s show, the town began attracting visitors looking for the pine tree. “I was constantly being asked where it was,” Rodriguez said. It was now a bigger lure than the memorial to Walter Benjamin, the Jewish thinker who had fled Nazi Germany and died in Portbou. (His death in 1940 was also first thought to have been a suicide. In recent years, some have argued that he may have been killed.)
These new tourists were evidence of a communal, morbid interest in the case, but they had done more than just gawk. They had turned the place where Evi was found into a monument.
When I visited, there were candles and flowers at the base of the pine tree. “This is a memorial to Evi Rauter,” read a hand-painted plaque. “And to all those people with no name.”
Before Cristina left for Florence, she and Rodriguez agreed to erect a proper sculpture in Portbou’s graveyard. It, too, will honour not just Evi, but the nameless dead.
In the UK, and Ireland Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
